The use of wireless devices has become an increasingly important part of everyday life. Wireless devices have become popular due to their portability, convenience, and ease of use. Today, wireless devices are used for a myriad of different applications including telephony, email, personal digital assistants (PDAs) as well as a variety of other functions and services. Integrated circuit technology has allowed for the miniaturization of circuits into smaller and smaller form factors, which has enabled additional functionality to be made available on wireless devices. Additionally, decreasing memory sizes have permitted wireless devices to store larger amounts of information. As a result, wireless networks are rapidly expanding bandwidth and services to accommodate this increase in wireless information and functionality.
Wireless devices today are capable of sending and receiving electronic messages as well as performing other personal information management (PIM) functions. For example, many wireless services allow the storage of user-specific information on a user's wireless device such as calendar, contacts, etc. Further, wireless devices are now being used for taking and storing pictures, listening to audio files, and watching video files. The increase in functionality has lead to larger file sizes. One limitation of current wireless networks; however, is that wireless networks have limited bandwidth and, since file sizes are becoming larger, it has become increasingly important to manage transmission of information over wireless networks.
Wireless networks can send and receive information at a much lower rate than most wired networks today. This limited bandwidth of wireless networks is due primarily to the range in which wireless devices are operated. Users of wireless devices may be remote to the supporting wireless service, and, depending on the service, the coverage area may be limited in some areas. Because of this, many functions desired by wireless users may require too much bandwidth for practical use. For example, sending and receiving pictures stored on a wireless device may take up to 500 kilobytes (kb) or more of network bandwidth. On many of today's networks, such a bandwidth limitation leads to excessively long download times. This situation becomes even worse for sending and receiving larger files over the wireless network such as audio and video files. Accordingly, what is needed is a method to send and receive large files over a wireless network over time with limited user involvement.